What if that character was portrayed by its creator as an accomplished poet and singer/songwriter, a profoundly loyal friend, a connoisseur of fine foods and an utterly decent chap with no vices whatsoever? You'd feel flattered, right? "Bring it on!" you'd enthuse.

How then are we able to explain this week's bewildering news of China's crackdown on Winnie the Pooh? Somehow Pooh the bear, the engaging, gentle, totally apolitical star of A.A. Milne's famous books for children (and of Disney creations based on those books) has upset China's hatchet-faced leadership.

"Winnie the Pooh might be a much-loved children's book character, but the bumbling bear has fallen foul of the Chinese Government's internet firewall," one report explains.

"After being used as a stand-in for the country's President, Xi Jinping, in a range of internet jokes — images, memes and GIFs of the honey-seeking Pooh have begun to quickly disappear online."

Sinologists explain that the crackdown on the Pooh character comes as China prepares for October's 19th National Congress of the Communist Party.

"The regime is a little bit humourless at the best of times, but it's even more sensitive at the moment about any kind of apparent ridiculing of the Chinese party leaders," a scholar has told the ABC.

But in what ways is Xi Jinping ridiculed by comparison with the adorable bear? For those of us who know the Winnie the Pooh books backwards (they were a pillar of my idyllic English childhood, a literary and moral influence that have helped make me the ACT Living Treasure I am today) this seems like almost the most flattering comparison one could wish for.

I have A.A.Milne's The House At Pooh Corner and The World Of Pooh here at my elbow as I write this. Leafing through them I'm reminded that other than the small matter of Pooh's erratic spelling (although it is still better than the spelling of University of Canberra students I've attempted to teach) and his being, blamelessly, "A Bear Of Very Little Brain," (again modern undergraduates leap to mind), it is impossible to find fault with him.

And journalists' characterisation this week of Pooh as "bumbling" seem defamatory and ill-informed. "Bumbling"? This is a bear who is the poet laureate of his action-packed forest, the One Hundred Acre Wood. "Bumbling?" Pooh is so nimble-minded he composes his songs (modestly, he calls them just "hums") then and there, instantly, on the spot, to commemorate things that have only just happened. When a gale knocks down the tree in which his friend Owl has lived Pooh composes an eight-verse epic poem/epic hum Here Lies A Tree off the top of his sweet teddy-bear head. It's quality stuff. Here's one of its verses.

"For lo! The wind was blusterous/And flattened out Owl's favourite tree;/And things looked bad for him and we - /Looked bad, I mean, for he and us - /I've never known them wuss."

Yes, Pooh can be a little bit timid. So for example he's anxious about the existential threat of the dreaded Heffalump that (although no one has seen it) is thought to be at large in the Hundred Acre Wood. But don't we all, even the bravest of us, have our own personal Heffalumps always at large in the Hundred Acre Woods of our minds, keeping us awake at night?

On the eve of the last ACT elections I was haunted by the chilling Heffalump of the possible election of a Liberal government. This week's announcement of the scarily monstrous new national security super-ministry and of how it will be led by the unspeakable Peter Dutton will strike some of us as a Double Heffalump.

So think again, so-called Xi Jinping! You are not ridiculed but exalted by comparison with the noble Sir Pooh de Bear (for Christopher Robin confers a knighthood on his soft-hearted and soft-abdomened companion in the enchanted twilight last pages of the last book of Pooh's adventures).

I am 71 now and beset with life's Heffalumps that gang up on us as we age. How simple and enchanted life seemed when my mother read the Pooh stories to freckle-faced, flaxen-haired, infant me.

At the Arboretum the other day I saw a carefree urchin at play and wearing a T-shirt that said "Don't grow up! It's a plot!"

"How true," I murmured as I set off, my knees creaking arthritically, through a forest in which life's real or imagined Heffalumps (some of them spine-chillingly Trump-shaped) seemed to lurk behind every tree.